What the internet is seeing - and what it’s hiding

Every time we use the internet, we give away a little bit of our souls. We don't get paid for it. Actually, the corporate world expects us to pay for the privilege. As Bogey said in Casablanca, "Maybe not today, but soon, and for the rest of our life."

And it's getting worse.

Everyone by now knows about targeted advertising. Show an interest in something and it follows you around the web, usually more annoying than inviting. It's not just a coincidence. It's millions of dollars of advertising and marketing money, invested in top-flight mathematicians and programmers who track us by the click.

And it's moving beyond advertising. We are, says Eli Pariser in his new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, being subjected to what he calls a "global lobotomy". Things aren't just being displayed to us. They're being hidden from us, too, in case we might not like them. Not just ads, but 'content'. So it goes, when we sell our souls for a free ride. Happened to Dr Faustus; happening to us.

In this case, our souls are information. Where you live, what you earn, who you live with, what you do for a living, how much you owe, where you travel, how you travel, the medication you're on, the shows you see, the food you eat, the friends you hang out with, where they live, what they earn... and so on, ad infinitum. A bit here, a bit there, but it all adds up to who you are.

It's all recorded. It's all tracked and analysed and data-mined with algorithms so subtle and complex they'd make your eyes bubble. And the final objective is to build, in some unlocatable server farm somewhere in the Mojave Desert, a simulacrum of your online soul, a sort of quintessence of you-in-the-Cloud, and use that to tailor what you see on the internet.

Knowledge is power, and power is money. But what bothers Pariser is the way that power and money are being exercised.

He writes that he first thought something was up when he discovered that two groups of people were getting widely different results when they searched online for 'BP'. One lot - environmentally-conscious liberals - got environmental stuff about oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Another lot, less touchy-feely and more worldly, got oil industry share prices and investment advice.

The world the internet showed them was, in both cases, the world they were already interested in.

It's a version of Donald Rumsfeld's remark about "unknown unknowns". That was widely mocked, but it was mocked because people thought that Rumsfeld was a half-baked malignant dickhead, not because he was wrong. Rumsfeld was actually pretty well-baked in this case. I know, for example, that I don't know anything about the chemistry of terpenes or the calculation of geostationary orbits. But there's stuff I don't even know enough about to know I don't know anything about it. Same goes for you.

Increasingly, Pariser asserts, the internet is being run on a 'personalised' level, with just enough random error to stop us smelling a rat. The result is unknown unknowns. Stuff we never see. Instead of diversity of opinion, we get conformity with our own interests and prejudices, and this, we think, is what the world is really like.

It's been going on for decades, though, long before the internet. The Daily Mail reader occupies a completely different socio-political planet from the Guardian reader. Each caters to the bigotries of its readership, and the argument is: how else could they survive?

But the newspapers don't have the vast penetration into every aspect of our lives that the net possesses. The idea of living in a wired world censored, not by an overarching state like China, but by a mash-up of corporations hungry for our money and armed with a knowledge of what presses our individual buttons, quite unimaginable only a few years ago, is, to say the least, disturbing.

In Pariser's lobotomised world it's perfectly possible that you won't be reading this if you're passionately pro-internet and only historically interested in stuff saying how wonderful it is.

And maybe you don't want to. Maybe I don't want to see stuff I don't like. Maybe we just share the basic human instinct to want our world-view reinforced.

But if the trick doesn't work, if the auto-censoring of the net doesn't produce results - and results, in this case, mean money - then that shady network of data-miners will change their tune.

The main product of the net, endlessly sold, refined and resold, is us. Our demographics, hopes, fears, interests, ambitions and vulnerabilities. But those data-miners aren't actually interested, no more than the second-hand car salesman is really your friend. They just want the money.

And it's that, rather than Pariser's laudable belief in the absolute value of diversity of argument, that is our best hope for an open net. How do I know? I don't. If I did, I'd be on a tropical island, waiting for them to bring round my yacht. It's an unknown unknown, but one can at least hope.

• The Filter Bubble: What The Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser, Viking. ISBN 978-0670920389 ·